1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for taking out a required article from a compartment of a rack or set of shelves and for storing or shelving the same in one of the compartments.
2. Description of the Background Art
Heretofore a stocking device having a lot of compartments or shelves has generally been used in order to store many different types of articles. As an example in the process of producing a tire, a die plate is used for extruding components such as tire treads. Many different kinds of die plates are selectively used in accordance with different sizes or types of tires and the components to be made. Thus several hundred different die plates corresponding to the different sizes or patterns of various kinds of tires should be prepared beforehand for a single tread extrusion line. In the conventional method for stocking die plates they are manually arranged and stored in compartments in racks.
However, in the conventional method, it is not easy to search for the position in a rack in which a required article is stored.
Furthermore there is now a change so that many kinds of tires are now produced on a small production scale basis as a result of progress in diversification of recent tire demands, so the frequency of changes of die plates in the tread extrusion line has become very high. Accordingly, using the above-mentioned storing method, it always takes too much time to find a required die plate from amongst the large number of die plates arranged in the storing racks.
Further, three is a danger of taking out a wrong die plate because there are many die plates which are similar to one another in size or shape. If a wrong die plate is used by mistake, there results a serious and very expensive defect in the tire quality. Therefore, there is a need for such error to be avoided absolutely.